By Alec Meer on April 4th, 2008 at 4:52 pm.
Things we don’t talk about much on RPS: deforestation, owls, pudding, longjohns, Sonic the Hedgehog, and cars. Well, let’s fix that latter at least.
A car game we can all get behind is smashy finger-steering fun ‘em up Trackmania. On April 16th, the latest version, Trackmania Nations Forever is to be released. And it’s free! Free! Free like the pudding-soiled longjohns Sonic the Hedgehog would doubtless donate to a shivering owl left homeless by deforestation!
Hopefully we’ll be talking about it loads come the day, but meantime here’s the new trailer:
04/04/2008 at 17:08 The_Mhor says:
So, actually, totally Free, or downloadable but riddled with Starforce still?
04/04/2008 at 17:34 Kismet says:
Neither Trackmania Nations Forever nor Trackmania United Forever (free upgrade to Trackmania United, released the same day as TMN Forever) should make use of StarForce, according to this interview to Florent Castelnerac of Nadeo on TM Exchange forums.
04/04/2008 at 18:19 Frymaster says:
In any case, I’m curious: how would it having starforce make it in any way, shape or form “not free”?
04/04/2008 at 18:19 Simon says:
Christ I hope the engine is a very scalable. The trailer looks like the specs might be pretty high. And don’t free games work best when the potential audience is as large as possible?
04/04/2008 at 18:28 Jim Rossignol says:
God, I love Trackmania.
04/04/2008 at 18:34 Cigol says:
More of a sim fan myself, just for the dynamics of it all, but this looks pretty fantastic – and I’ve never played the originals so I’ll keep my eye on this.
04/04/2008 at 18:55 Cédric says:
Trackmania’s engine is one of the best scalable engine ever.
04/04/2008 at 18:58 FP says:
I loved (and completed) the original TM but the last two (Sunrise and United) just got way too hard after the half-way point. Either they’re catering more to hardcore racing fans or my hand-eye coordination isn’t what it used to be.
04/04/2008 at 19:04 dartt says:
Excuse me, did you say FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE?!
04/04/2008 at 19:23 Ted says:
re: scalability
The Trackmania engine runs great even on mid-to-low end machines. I had an older laptop it ran fine on. You tune down the pretty details, like motion blur, and you’re fine.
Online is great because it’s not bumper cars like other racers, instead – you are just racing for best time and coolest stunts. Other players on the track at the same time are shown as ghosts, so you just pass through them, thus saving tons of CPU cycles and bandwidth.
04/04/2008 at 19:25 Niall Sheffield says:
Is it me, or do we not praise the developers enough, I think this is their third (dunno) free game, that deserves some mighty points in the gamers book.
04/04/2008 at 19:35 fluffy bunny says:
I love this. But the best news, for me, is the extra content for TrackMania United – TMN is a fantastic little game, but TMU is just…. omg.
Here’s a lovely user-made video of the new desert environment in TMU: http://www.vimeo.com/822926
04/04/2008 at 19:38 caramelcarrot says:
I wasted a good amount of my summer playing Track Mania Nations against friends and getting gold/naedo on all the training tracks, this should be awesome.
04/04/2008 at 22:04 Forceflow says:
Too bad it still features StarForce copy protection. For a bloody free game.
04/04/2008 at 22:05 restricted3 says:
I’m glad Nadeo decided to drop StarForce, and also a bit puzzled, since Florent (Nadeo’s boss) thought that StarForce was “the perfect neon to keep away some people having dumb behavior from the community” (referring to people that said that SF was bad an over the top).
A broken burner in my old machine says otherwise.
That’s Nadeo: great games, not so great people.
Edit after Forceflow’s comment: so does it have SF or not?. I was thinking about buying TMU, but I will definitely not if it has StarForce. I have dumb behaviour, you know.
04/04/2008 at 22:19 Mickiscoole says:
@restricted3:
TM on steam doesn’t use Starforce
05/04/2008 at 09:47 fluffy bunny says:
Forceflow: Do you ever read threads before responding? Or, you know, check if you’ve got your facts right? This game will not have StarForce, as was explained in the second post in this thread.
05/04/2008 at 14:27 fluffy bunny says:
Uh, apologies for the harsh tone of that last message. I’ve been a fan of TrackMania since the early days (I got hooked on the betademo of the first game), and the constant attacks from the anti-starforce brigade has taken it’s toll. It’s so tiresome that _every single time_ someone starts discussing my favourite modern game, the discussion eventually turns into a Starforce-argument. So I’m probably a little too touchy on the subject.
That said, you should have read the thread before commenting. :-)
05/04/2008 at 17:44 Masterdog says:
fluffy – that new content looks nice. Definitely looking forward to that. Hopefully we won’t see a raft of Nations-capable servers clogging up the serverlisting in United tho…still want to play my Desert and Alpine tracks. (Or ‘challenges’ as the game insists on calling em)
Btw – what’s your ingame name?
05/04/2008 at 18:01 restricted3 says:
Thanks, Mickiscoole, I’ll definitely buy it on Steam then!
Fluffy – perhaps there’s a reason for that, but I’m glad Nadeo dropped SF (or allowed Steam to sell the game without it at least). I also got tired of being jumped upon in the official forums just because I said that SF was cumbersome and useless (in addition to plain bad for your computer).
But whatever, I’m glad I can finally play TMU
06/04/2008 at 10:18 Radiant says:
They use starforce not for cd protection but for code encryption to stop cheating.
But anyway; I just found out my ps3 wheel works on my pc so my question is what other good pc arcade racer are there?
Apart from rollcage :)